Thursday morning (Nov. 3) seven coworkers and I will begin the eight hour drive to Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico. We work in this small, coastal desert city twice a year building homes, churches, school rooms, community centers, and whatever else our board of pastors for that area requests to aid in their ministries. It is always an amazing, awakening, difficult, draining, and powerful experience.

The families we meet there live in some of the worst conditions we see in the ministry. Often, large families have fastened their homes together out of whatever scrap cardboard and wood they can find laying around. It is not uncommon to see other homes pieced together from scraps of drywall leftover from the waste of the multi-million dollar hotels going up on the beach a few miles away. There, the families for whom we build are lucky if the floors of their houses are anything other than the fine desert sand dominating the landscape of the region.

It is by no coincidence then, that Puerto Peñasco has become a place of great personal growth for me. It is there I witness faith in its most pure form. Not a faith based on what has been "provided" them, but rather a faith because it is all they have to hang on to.

I write this now because I want all of you who read this to please keep my team and I in prayer while we are there (we return Nov. 15). We have a great deal of work to do even before our groups arrive, but I would hate for us to get so focused on the work we fail to see God working through the process as a whole (Amor guys sometimes get so focused on the work they forget their own names).

So I hope this post finds you all well. I will try to write from Puerto Peñasco if I have a chance...I'm sure there will be many good stories to tell. Peace.